Wherein Audie and Prudence
Continue Their Search For Mr. Bell and a New System

At A Show in the Made Man
Motel

by Barry Grant

LXXXIX

Scene 1

Gold Chips

Prudence: Audie. . .

Audie: Prue. . .

Prudence: I have an urge.

Audie: To do epistemology?

Prudence: How did you know?
Do you think it has something to do with these gold chips or disks we’re
walking on? They’re all over the hall.

Audie: They could be the
cause. How can we know?

Prudence: We could do an
A/B, like your magazines write about. Or a double blind.

Audie: But maybe the disks
know you’ve already walked on them and don’t repeat their effect? And maybe
they only work if they know you know you are walking on them?

Prudence: But Audie, isn’t
the fundamental question theoretical? How can little pieces of plastic cause
a desire to engage in a form of philosophical thought? Doesn’t that violate
the laws of physics?

Audie: Who knows? Have we
gotten to the end of physics?

Prudence: Come to think of
it, how would we know we’ve gotten to the end?

Audie: Prue, this is
exhausting. You don’t sound at all like yourself. I don’t know what these
disks are doing to us, but let’s get moving.

Noise is
unavoidably generated at the quantum level.

Audie: That voice again!
What a claim! Noise by definition is an audible, subjective phenomenon.
Remember our conversation about Merzbow? Can the author hear subatomic
particles?

Prudence: Maybe the author
means by noise any difference between signal input and output. That leaves
him with the problem of demonstrating a causal relationship between
subatomic waveforms and audible frequencies.

Audie: Prue. Look! One of
the chips has broken open. There’s another piece of plastic inside. It’s
blank. Turns it over. No. Look. It’s a symbol of some sort.

Prudence:
Om. The symbol of everything, the known and the unknown.

Audie: How can a plastic
symbol. . . Prudence places her hand over Audie’s mouth. She replaces her
hand with her soft, warm lips.

Audie: Um.

XC

Scene 2

Audie and Prudence stop in
front of a door. Next to the door is a sign.

The sign says, Broadview
Systems Analysis.

They enter.

Prudence: We are looking
for Mr. Bell, Peter Bell. Director of the One World Free Vegetarian
Foundation. Do you know him? He might be in trouble.

Pitchman: Sorry, I’ve never
heard of him

Audie: He might be
exhibiting a mono system.

Pitchman: I can’t help you,
but please, come in, sit down. Audie and Prudence sit on the edge of a
bed. Squiggles, X’s, lines, and dots cover the four walls of the room. A
legend indicating the meaning of the dots and lines in terms of squiggles
and squiggles in terms of dots and lines runs across the bottom of the
walls. Papers with similar notations lay in piles on the furniture and
floor.

Pitchman: My name is
Broadview, Bob Broadview, of Broadview Systems Analysis. Let me ask you,
Where does a system end? Exactly. Systems don’t end. They have beginnings,
but no ends.

Audie: Dr. Johnson said the
same.

Pitchman: Furrows brow.
There are the sources, controls, amps, and transducers, of course. And the
wires. And racks and stands. I have spent years on those alone. There’s the
room. You have the dimensions, the surfaces and substances. The molecular
density of paint and other surfaces and their reflective properties. The
furnishings. The Q. Dust density, amount, and type. Air flow. Then there’s
electricity, gravity, humidity, temperature, the oxygen percentage of the
air, and air pollution. Sound travels slower in C02.
The effects of solar activity, cosmic radiation, and temperature. The size,
density, and consciousness of the listeners. A system goes out into the
universe and in to yourself. What you had for dinner. The current
administration. Can you really enjoy a hundred thousand dollar system when
people are starved, tortured, and deceived by corporations, governments, and
ad hoc committees?

JLIAT JAZZ - one work based on a file of PCM data using 16
bits (signed integer) and a 44.100 khz sample rate which is typically
used in digital audio. The range of values allowed are therefore -32768
to +32767. The piece of < 1.5 seconds consists of setting each
successive word (16 bits) from -32768 to +32767 giving the full range of
65536 states that all such sound files (and CDs) typically encode. (i.e.
other works found on CD are never more than variations)

Still Life #3 CDR packed with full printout of digital data
in a limited edition of 100 copies.

www. jliat.demon.co.uk

Man: 65536 states times
44100 samples a second times 60 seconds in a minute times 75 minutes. Not
enough time in the universe for all the possibilities and the sound still
sucks.

Audie and Prudence stop in
front of a door. Next to the door is a sign.

The sign says, Oz
Acoustics.

They enter.

Prudence: We are looking
for Mr. Bell, Peter Bell. Director of the One World Free Vegetarian
Foundation. Do you know him? He might be in trouble.

Pitchman: Sorry, I’ve never
heard of him

Audie: He might be
exhibiting a mono system.

Pitchman: Can’t help you,
but please, come in, sit down. I’m Dr. Bob Marvel, president of Oz
Acoustics. Our research has determined that most audiophiles have very good
systems. None of them perfect, of course, but most of them pretty darn good.
The problem with most systems is not the system, but the owner! Audiophiles
are nagged by doubt and insecurity about the quality of their auditory
judgment.

Audie: To himself.
That’s me!

Pitchman: They doubt their
systems because they don’t have the courage to trust their ears.

Audie: You do
psychotherapy?

Pitchman: Too messy. Our
solution goes immediately to the root of the problem. We offer a range of
genuine medals, from Bronze Ears to Platinum Ears, to the highest level,
Celestial Ears! Our technicians are currently at work on an even more subtle
and refined level. We’ll announce it at the next A Show. I’m very excited
about it! Our upgrade program allows customers to improve their systems as
finances allow. We also offer certificates suitable for framing, stationary,
and genuine letters from our president (that’s me) testifying to the quality
of the audiophile’s auditory judgment.

Pitchman: Thanks for
stopping by. Here, for you and the lady. An Oz Acoustics “I Can Hear!” pin.

Prudence: Thank you!

Audie: Yea, thanks.

XCIII

Scene 5

Audie and Prudence stop in
front of a door. Next to the door is a sign.

The sign says, The Sound
of Two Curved Panels

They enter.

Prudence: We are looking
for Mr. . . Hey. What is this place?

What is the Sound of

Two Curved Panels?

Reflections on Music Reproduction

Donaueschinger Musiktage, 1999

by Albert Grantowski

Audie: Grantowski! Again!
Who is that guy? This is really odd. It’s all writing. I think we’ve walked
in to an essay!

The signs to Bernhard
Leitner’s sound installation, Wasserspiegel, led to a path off the grounds
of a castle, where Alvin Curran’s Totodonaueschinger played. The path ended
at a tiny pavilion perched above a drainage spout that empties into a
stream. I had wandered this way the previous night when Curran performed the
piece to open the Musiktage.

Audie: Do you see any
signs, or a museum?

I noticed that the sound of
the water rushing from the pipe changed in pitch and density as I moved my
head or walked across the pavilion.

Prudence: No. No streams or
spouts either. Just, er, text?

I thought: That’s just what
happens. I don’t know anything about the acoustics of small, opened-sided
structures with four meter ceilings. Now I see two curved panels hanging
from the ceiling. This is Wasserspiegel—the two panels, in this particular
place. What is the sound of the panels? I wondered.

Prudence: Do you hear
anything?

Audie: No. Just your
heartbeat, and mine.

Prudence: Hold me.

I descended the pavilion’s
two small steps and headed through town, past a tamping machine banging
pavers into place, to the Blaues Rathaus building, the site of Johannes S.
Sistermann’s, Uberschreiten Raum Allein. Saxophone notes, saws, car horns,
scudding electronic beats, clangs, squeaks, crying babies, “creaking doors,”
electronic sound washes came from. . . everywhere on three floors of the
municipal building. Later, sitting in the lobby, I watched visitors enter
the main doors, look quizzically around, and head up the stairs in search of
the sound source, just as I had done. Poking behind doors, scanning spaces,
I had discovered tiny copper strands running along the bottom of walls to
backs of pictures, mirrors, and benches. The furniture was wired with
speakers, or wired as speakers.

Audie: Prue, let’s get out
of here!

The idea of reproducing the
Curran or Sistermann or Leitner, of getting them right, or getting close to
their real sound is absurd.

There is nothing to get
right. The original sound is ungraspable, even as it is experienced.
Recordings can only be sonic descriptions of sonic events. Recordings are
tales.

Music recording is an art,
but the art does not lie in getting the sound right. The art lies in making
the sound interesting. There are no standards for what a recording should
do, just as there are no standards of verisimilitude for photos or essays.
Every encoding of a piece is the result of choice or inattention—which
microphones, where, preamp, medium, and so on, to the engineering and
manufacturing of the retail product.

Sonic reproduction in the
home is an art, but the art does not lie in getting the original sound or
the recording right, the art lies in making the sound interesting.

Audie: Wait a minute.
This is getting interesting. It may help.

The desire for a true or
absolute sound in one’s living room is the product of cultural forces and
business interests. It is instructive to note the absence of an analogous
phenomenon in photography. No one expects a photograph of an art work to
look exactly like the original. No one purchases multiple reproductions,
hoping each new image more closely approaches reality. (“Sweetheart, that is
the 12th photo of Sunflowers you’ve bought this year. What was wrong with
the last one?” “Look at the aching orange yellows in this one!”) A soldier
once complained to Picasso that his female nudes were unreal. Picasso asked
if he had a picture of his girlfriend. The soldier eagerly produced a
picture of a charming young woman. Picasso took it in hand, examined it, and
said, “Kind of small, isn’t she?”